Pages

03 August 2011

When bullshit fails…

try more bullshit.

Well, that’s apparently the latest tactic the Bloc NDP are trying to deploy in an effort to distract attention from the fact that Jack Layton’s handpicked successor was a card-carrying member of the separatist Bloc Quebecois until January when she left the party to run for the NDP.

I didn’t inhale, Turmel says, of separatism, contending she is and always has been a federalist.

No one outside the troubled Bloc NDP bought that line.

So now they tried another one: Turmel will cut all ties to separatists. As the Globe quotes:

“I am a federalist,” the rookie MP and Interim Leader of the Official Opposition said in an interview. “I want to reassure people about my allegiance to the NDP, my allegiance to Canadians, and reassure them that we are getting ready for the fall sitting of Parliament to work on their behalf.”

Turmel, who has been an NDP member since 1991; also claims that she joined the Bloc in 2006 because she liked their anti-scab agenda. She didn’t support separatism, she says.

At this point you can see this story is not going to get any better.

At worst, Turmel is a liar.

But at best, you have to believe that the woman who ran the Public Service Alliance of Canada, has been active politically for more than a couple of decades and who now leads the Bloc NDP was so politically stupid – naive isn’t strong enough a word – that she felt she had to join the Bloc in 2006 because she liked one of their policies.

Beggars the old imagination, doesn’t it?

This is the latest variation in the story of Turmel and her membership in a separatist party. The fact that it is the latest variation in the story should be a clue that what you are getting from the Bloc NDP and its leader is bullshit.

A simple story requires only one variation: the truth. When politicians start adding all these sorts of rationalizations or childish claims, they just make their own problem worse. if nothing else, this sort of stuff smacks of political arrogance: Turmel and her handlers apparently feel they can bullshit Canadians and that voters will just accept whatever codswallop they spit out.

Time will tell if that’s true.

It hasn’t been a very successful political strategy for others.

And given that the Bloc NDP has more than a few sovereignists in its caucus - apparently - and an agenda that sovereignists like, odds are it won’t work in this case either.

The fractures are there.

Once Jack departs the leadership, as it seems he inevitably will, don’t expect the paper Nycole and her supporters have slapped on them to hold for very long.